Why is SEO perceived as such a scary thing and does that perception need to persist for people to do it right?

That is an excellent question that is very rarely asked. I think SEO has kind of a reputation as kind of a shady kind of industry, with kind of a checkered past, because the people who buy SEO service, they tend to be a very low information buyer, which means that the people who provide the service can get away with some less than perfectly ethical tactics. When the people who hire you to do something have no clue what you're going to do, that creates an atmosphere, an environment where it's ripe for people that are less than perfectly standup professionals to actually succeed.

For example, people who hire SEOs often pay $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 a month, think they need to keep paying that money to keep ranking. That's never true, which means that there's a lot of SEOs that can kind of rest on their laurels and keep cashing that check, even though they might not be doing a whole bunch of stuff after the first few months, other than making the major improvements.

On the topic of writing business books: the book becomes another reformatting of your content that is ultimately intended to drive demand, qualified demand, and preference and differentiation as well, right?

The book just barely pays for itself. I think it sold like not even 10,000 copies total over the last however many years, but in a B2B sales context, which we all are passionate about this topic of sales, it's a great leave-behind. It's sort of a $10 business card strategy. We build websites. You meet with four companies to build your website. One of them left behind a book that blows your mind with everything you need to know. It's the driver's manual for the website and that gives you a competitive advantage in sales. It's extremely effective in that way.

If I wanted to use it more for PR, I could just send it to people who I think might include me in something they're working on or invite me to their event. If I was more deliberate about trying to get sales, I could just send it to different professors who teach marketing hoping they might include it in their syllabus. But yeah, it's just another format for content. It's something that's part of a family of content.

Your job is to create traffic champions through your content.

You want to create a couple more traffic champions because there's always a few things that have a massive disproportionate effect on your total number of visitors. If your job is to create a couple more traffic champions knowing that that's going to create just way more brand awareness for you, then you don't want to just keep making more medium quality things. You want to go make a couple more great things.

Listen to the full replay to get the rest of the insights and tactics.

About our guest, Andy Crestodina:

Andy Crestodina is a cofounder and the strategic director of Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning web design company, which has completed more than 1,000 successful website projects. He is a top-rated speaker at national conferences who is dedicated to the teaching of marketing. His favorite topics include search engine optimization, social media, analytics, and content strategy. He has written more than 100 articles on content marketing topics. He lives in Chicago.